Chapter IX: The Gate of Horn (1)

Guy thought it would be better if he went straight back to Plashers Mead; but Michael asked him to stay until the next day. He was in no mood, he said, for a solitary evening, and he could not bear the notion of visiting friends, or of talking to his mother without the restriction that somebody else’s presence would produce.

So Guy agreed to spend the night in London, and they dined with Mrs. Fane. Michael in the sun-colored Summer room felt smothered by a complete listlessness; and talking very little, he sat wondering at the swiftness with which a strong fabric of the imagination had tumbled down. The quiet of Cheyne Walk became a consciousness of boredom and futility, and he suggested on a sudden impulse that he and Guy should go and visit Maurice in the studio. It would be pleasant walking along the Embankment, he said.

“But I thought you wanted to keep quiet,” Guy exclaimed.

“No, I’ve grown restless during dinner; and, besides, I want to make a few arrangements about the flat, and then be done with that business—forever.”

They started off without waiting for coffee. It was a calm Summer evening of shadows blue and amethyst, of footfalls and murmurs, an evening plumy as a moth, warm and gentle as the throat of a pigeon. Nobody on any pavement was hurrying; and maidservants loitered in area gates, looking up and down the roads.

The big room at the top of 422 Grosvenor Road had never seemed so romantic. There were half a dozen people sitting at the open windows; and Cunningham was playing a sonata of Brahms, a sonata with a melody that was drawing the London night into this big room where the cigarettes dimmed and brightened like stars. The player sat at the piano for an hour, and Maurice unexpectedly made no attempt to disturb the occasion. Michael thought that perhaps he was wondering what had brought himself and Guy here, and for that reason did not rush to show Guy his studio by gaslight: Maurice was probably thinking how strange it was for Michael to revisit him suddenly like this after their quarrel.

When the room was lighted up, Michael and Guy were introduced to the men they did not know. Among them was Ronnie Walker, the painter whom Maurice had mentioned to Michael as an old lover of Lily. Michael knew now why Maurice had allowed the music to go on so long, and he was careful to talk as much as possible to Walker in order to embarrass Maurice, who could scarcely pay any attention to Guy, so nervously was he watching over his shoulder the progress of the conversation.

Later on Michael called Maurice aside, and they withdrew to the window-seat which looked out over the housetops. A cat was yauling on a distant roof, and in the studio Cunningham had seated himself at the piano again.

“I say, I’m awfully sorry that Ronnie Walker should happen to be here to-night,” Maurice began. “I have been rather cursing myself for telling you about him and....”

“It doesn’t matter at all,” Michael interrupted. “I’m not going to marry her.”

“Oh, that’s splendid!” Maurice exclaimed. “I’ve been tremendously worried about you.”

Michael looked at him; he was wondering if it were possible that Maurice could be “tremendously worried” by anything.

“I want you to arrange matters,” said Michael. “I can’t go near the place again. She will probably prefer to go away from Ararat House. The rent is paid up to the June quarter. The furniture you can do what you like with. Bring some of it here. Sell the rest, and give her the money. Get rid of the woman who’s there—Miss Harper her name is.”

“But I shall feel rather awkward....”

“Oh, don’t do it. Don’t do it, then!” Michael broke in fretfully. “I’ll ask Guy.”

“You’re getting awfully irascible,” Maurice complained. “Of course I’ll do anything you want, if you won’t always jump down my throat at the first word I utter. What has happened, though?”

“What do you expect to happen when you’re engaged to a girl like that?” Michael asked.

Maurice shrugged his shoulders.

“Oh, well, of course I should expect to be badly let down. But then, you see, I’m not a very great believer in women. What are you going to do yourself?”

“I haven’t settled yet. I’ve got to arrange one or two things in town, and then I shall go abroad. Would you be able to come with me in about a week?”

“I daresay I might,” Maurice answered, looking vaguely round the room. Already, Michael thought, the subject was floating away from his facile comprehension.

The piano had stopped, and conversation became general again.

“This is where you ought to be, if you want to write,” Maurice proclaimed to Guy. “It’s ridiculous for you to bury yourself in the country. You’ll expire of stagnation.”

“Just at present I recommend you to stay where you are,” said Castleton. “I’m almost expiring from the violence with which I am being precipitated from one to another of Maurice’s energies.”

Soon afterward Michael and Guy left the studio and walked home; and next morning Guy went back to Wychford.

Michael was astonished at his own calmness. After the first shock of the betrayal he had gone and talked to a lot of people; he had coldly made financial arrangements; he had even met and rather liked a man whom only yesterday morning he could not have regarded without hatred for the part he had played in Lily’s life. Perhaps he had lost the power to feel anything deeply for long; perhaps he was become a sort of Maurice; already Lily seemed a shade of the underworld, merely more clearly remembered than the others. Yet in the moment that he was calling her a shade his present emotion proved that she was much more than that, for the conjured image of her was an icy pang to his heart. Then the indifference returned, but always underneath it the chill remained.

Mrs. Fane asked if he would care to go to the Opera in the evening: and they went to Bohême. Michael used to be wrung by the music, but he sat unmoved to-night. Afterward, at supper, he looked at his mother as if she were a person in a picture; he was saddened by the uselessness of all beauty, and by the number of times he would have to undress at night and dress again in the morning. He had no objection to life itself, but he felt an overwhelming despair at the thought of any activity in the conduct of it. He was sorry for the people sitting here at supper and for their footmen waiting outside. He felt that he was spiritually withered, because he was aware that he was surrendering to the notion of a debased material comfort as the only condition worth achieving for a body that remained perfectly well; grossly well, it almost seemed.

“Michael, have you been bored to-night?” his mother asked, when they had come home and were sitting by the window in the drawing-room, while Michael finished a cigar.

He shook his head.

“You seemed to take no interest in the opera, and you usually enjoy Puccini, don’t you? Or was it Wagner you enjoy so much?”

“I think summer in London is always tiring,” he said.

She was in that rosy mist of clothes with which his earliest pictures of her were vivid. Suddenly he began to cry.

“Dear child, what is it?” she whispered, with fluttering arms outstretched to comfort him.

“Oh, I’ve finished with all that! I’ve finished with all that! You’ll be delighted—you mustn’t be worried because I seem upset for the moment. I found out that Lily did not care anything about me. I’m not going to marry her or even see her again.”

“Michael! My dearest boy! What is it?”

“Finished! Finished! Finished!” he sobbed.

“Nothing is finished at twenty-three,” she murmured, leaning over to pet him.

“I do hate myself for having hurt your feelings the other day.”

It was as if he seized upon a justification for grief so manifest. It seemed to him exquisitely sad that he should have wounded his mother on account of that broken toy of a girl. Soon he could control himself again; and he went off to bed.

Next day Michael’s depression was profound because he could perceive no reaction from himself on Lily. The sense of personal loss was merged in the reproach of failure; he had simply been unable to influence her. She was the consummation of many minor failures. And what was to happen to her now? What was to happen to all the people with whose lives he had lately been involved? Must he withdraw entirely and confess defeat? No doubt a cynic would argue that Lily was hopeless, and indeed he knew that from any point of view where marriage was concerned she was hopeless. He must leave her where he had found her, in that pretty paradise of evil which now she well adorned. If her destiny was to whirl downward through the labyrinths of the underworld, he could do no more. That himself had issued with the false dreams through the ivory gate was her fault, and she must pay the penalty of her misdirection. He would revisit Leppard Street, and from the innermost circle where he had beheld Mrs. Smith he would seek a way out through the gate of true dreams. He would be glad to see if the amount of security he had been able to guarantee to Barnes had helped him at all. He had money and he could leave money behind in Leppard Street, money that might preserve the people in the house where he had lived. Was this a quixotic notion, to leave one set of people free from the necessity to hand themselves over to evil? Michael’s spirits began to rise as he looked forward to what he could still effect in Leppard Street. And for Lily what could he still do? He would visit Sylvia and consult with her. She was strong, and if she had chosen harlotry, she was still strong. She was not lazy nor languid. Lazy, laughing, languid Lily! Lily did not laugh much; she was too lazy even for that. How beautiful she had been! Her beauty stabbed him with the poignancy of what was past. How beautiful she had been! When Maurice went to tell her of the final ending of it all, she would pout and shrug her shoulders. That was all she would do; and she would be faintly resentful at having been disturbed in her lazy life. Perhaps Maurice would fall in love with her, and it would be ironical and just that she should fall violently in love with Maurice and be cast off by him. Maurice would never suffer; as soon as a woman showed a sign of upsetting his theories about feminine behavior he would be done with her. He would jilt her as easily as he jilted one Muse for another. Why was he being so hard on Maurice?

“I believe that down in my heart I still don’t really like him,” Michael said to himself. “Right back from the time I met him in Macrae’s form at Randell’s I’ve never really liked him.”

It was curious how one could grow more and more intimate with a person, and all the time never really like him; so intimate with him as to intrust him with the disposal of a wrecked love-affair, and all the while never really like him. Why, then, had he invited Maurice to go abroad? Perhaps he wanted the company of someone he could faintly despise. Even friendship must pay tribute to human vanity. Life became a merciless business when one ceased to stand alone. The herding instinct of man was responsible for the corruption of civilization, and Michael thought of the bestiality of a crowd. How loathsome humanity was in the aggregate, but individually how rare, how wonderful.

Michael walked boldly enough toward Tinderbox Lane; and when he rang the bell of Mulberry Cottage not a qualm of sentiment assailed him. He was definitely pleased with himself, as he stood outside the door in the wall, to think with what a serenity of indifference he was able to visit a place so much endeared to him a little time ago.

Mrs. Gainsborough answered the door and nearly fell upon Michael’s neck.

“Good Land! Here’s a surprise.”

“It’s almost more of a surprise for me to see you, Mrs. Gainsborough.”

“Why, who else should you see?”

“I was beginning to think you never existed. Can I come in?”

“Sylvia’s indoors,” she said warningly.

“I rather wanted to see her.”

“She’s been carrying on alarming about you ever since you stole her Lily. And she didn’t take me on her knee and cuddle me, when she found you were gone off. How do you like me new frock?”

Michael thought that in her checkered black and green gingham she looked like an old Summer number of an illustrated magazine, and he told her so.

“Well, there! Did you ever? I never did. There’s a bouquet to hand a lady! Back number! Whatever next? I wonder you hadn’t the liberty to say I’d rose from the grave.”

“Aren’t I to see Sylvia?” Michael asked, laughing.

“Well, don’t blame me if she packs you off with a flea in your ear, as they say—well, she is a Miss Temper, and no mistake. How do you like me garden?”

Mulberry Cottage was just the bower of greenery that Michael had supposed he would find in early June.

“Actually roses,” he exclaimed. “Or at least there will be very soon.”

“Oh, yes. Glory de Die-Johns. That was always Pa’s favorite. That and a good snooze of a Sunday afternoon was about what he cared most for in this world. But my Captain he used to like camellias, and gardenias of course—oh, he had a very soft corner in his heart for a nice gardenia. Ah dear, what a masher he was to be sure!”

Sylvia had evidently seen them walking up the garden path, for leaning over the railings of the balcony she was waiting for them.

“Here’s quite a stranger come to see you,” said Mrs. Gainsborough, with a propitiatory glance in Sylvia’s direction.

“I rather want to have a talk with you,” said Michael, and he, too, found himself rather annoyingly adopting a deprecating manner.

Sylvia came slowly down the balcony steps.

“I suppose you want my help,” she said, and her underlip had a warning out-thrust.

“I’ll get on with my fal-lals,” Mrs. Gainsborough muttered, and she bundled herself quickly indoors.

Sylvia and Michael sat down on the garden-seat under the mulberry tree whose leaves were scarcely yet uncurling. Michael found a great charm in sitting close to Sylvia like this: she and Stella both possessed a capacity for bracing him that he did not find in anyone else. Sylvia was really worth quarreling with; but it would be very delightful to be friends with her. He had never liked a person so much whom he had so little reason to like. He could not help thinking that in her heart Sylvia must like him. It was a strangely provocative fancy.

“Lily and I have parted,” he began at once.

“And why do you suppose that piece of information will interest me?” Sylvia asked.

Michael was rather taken aback. When he came to consider it, there did seem no good reason why Sylvia should any longer be interested after the way in which Lily had been snatched away from her. He was silent for a moment.

“But it would have interested you a short time ago,” he said.

“No doubt,” Sylvia agreed. “But luckily for me one of the benefits conferred by my temperament is an ability to throw aside things that have disappointed me, things that have ceased to be useful—and what applies to things applies even more strongly to people.”

“You mean to say you’ve put Lily right out of your life?” Michael exclaimed.

He was shocked by the notion, for he did not realize until this moment how much he had been depending upon Sylvia for peace of mind.

“Haven’t you put her out of _your_ life?” she asked, looking round at him sharply. Until this question she had been staring sullenly down at the grass.

“Well, I had to,” said Michael.

“You’re bearing up very well under the sad necessity,” she sneered.

“I don’t know that I am bearing up very well. I don’t think that coming to you to talk about it is a special sign of fortitude.”

“What do you want me to do?” Sylvia demanded. “Get her back into your life again? Isn’t that the phrase you like?”

“Oh, no, that’s unimaginable,” said Michael. “You see, it was really the second time. Once six years ago, and again now, very much more—more utterly. You said that your temperament enables you to throw off things and people. Mine makes me bow to what I fancy are irremediable strokes of fate.”

“Unimaginable! Irremediable! We’re turning this interview into a Rossetti sonnet,” Sylvia scoffed.

“I was thinking about that poem Jenny to-day. It’s funny you should mention Rossetti.”

“Impervious youth!” she exclaimed.

“It’s hopeless for you to try to wound me with words,” Michael assured her, with grave earnestness. “I was wounded the day before yesterday into complete immunity from small pains.”

“I suppose you found her ...”

Michael flushed and gripped her by the wrist.

“No, no, don’t say something brutal and beastly!” he stammered. “You know what happened. You prophesied it. Well, I thought you were wrong, and you were right. That’s a victory for you. You couldn’t wish for me to be more humbled than I am by having to admit that I wasn’t strong enough to keep her faithful for six weeks. But we did agree, I think, about one thing.” He smiled sadly. “We did agree that she was beautiful. You were as proud of that as I was, and of course you had a great deal more reason to be proud. You did own her. I never owned her, and isn’t that your great objection to the relation between man and woman?”

“What are you trying to make me do?” Sylvia asked.

“I want you to have Lily to live with you again.”

“To relieve yourself of all responsibility, I suppose,” she said bitterly.

“No, no; why will you persist in ascribing the worst motive to everything I say? Isn’t your jealousy fed full enough even yet?”

Sylvia made the garden-seat quiver with an irritable movement.

“You will persist in thinking that jealousy solved all problems,” she cried.

“Oh, don’t let us turn aside into what isn’t very important. You can’t care whether I think you’re jealous or not.”

“I don’t care in so far as it is your opinion,” Sylvia admitted. “But I object to inaccurate thinking. If your life was spent in a confusion of all moral values as mine is, you would be anxious for a little straightforward computation for a change.”

“Perhaps you are right,” Michael admitted, “in thinking that I’m asking you to look after Lily to relieve myself of a responsibility. But it’s only because I see no chance of doing it in any other way. I mean—it’s not laziness on my part. It’s a confession of absolute failure.”

“In fact, you’re throwing yourself on my mercy,” Sylvia said.

“Yes; and also her,” he added gently.

“Am I such a moral companion—such an ennobling influence?”

“I would sooner think of her under your influence than think of her drifting. What I want you to understand is that I’m not consigning her to you for sentimental reasons. I would sooner that Lily were dragged down by you at a gallop than that she should sink slowly and lazily of her own accord. You have a strong personality. You are well-read. You are quite out of the common, and in the life you have chosen, so far as I have had experience, you are unique.”

Sylvia stared in front of her, and Michael waited anxiously for the reply.

“Have you ever read Petronius?” she asked suddenly.

“Yes, but what an extraordinary girl you are—have you ever read Petronius?”

“It’s the only book in which anyone in my position with my brains could behold herself. Oh, it is such a nightmare. And life is a nightmare, too. After all, what is life for me? Strange doors in strange houses. Strange men and strange intimacies. Scenes incredibly grotesque and incredibly beastly. The secret vileness of human nature flung at me. Man revealing himself through individual after individual as utterly contemptible. What can I worship? Not my own body soiled by my traffic in it. Not any religion I’ve ever heard of, for in all religions man is set up to be respected. I tell you, my dear eager fool, it is beyond my conception ever, ever, ever to regard a man as higher than a frog, as less repulsive than—ugh! it makes me shudder—but oh, my son, doesn’t it make me laugh....” She rocked herself with extravagant mirth for a moment. Then she began again, staring out in front of her intensely, fiercely, speaking with the monotonous voice of a visionary. “So I worship woman, and in this nightmare city, in this nightmare life, Lily was always beautiful; only beautiful, mind you. I don’t want to worship anything but beauty. I don’t care about purity or uprightness, but I must have beauty. And you came blundering along and kidnapped my lovely girl. You came along, thinking you were going to regenerate her, and you can’t understand that I’m only able to see you in the shape of a frog. It does amuse me to hear you talking to me so solemnly and so earnestly and so nobly ... and all the time I can only see a clumsy frog.”

“But what has all this to do with Petronius? There’s nothing in that romance particularly complimentary to women,” Michael argued.

“It’s the nightmare effect of it that I adore,” Sylvia exclaimed. “It’s the sensation of being hopelessly plunged into a maze of streets from which there’s no escape. I was plunged just like that into London. It is gloriously and sometimes horribly mad, and that’s all I want in my reading now. I want to be given the sensation of other people having been mad before me ... years ago in a nightmare. Besides, think of the truth, the truth of a work of art that seems ignorant of goodness. Not one moderately decent person all through.”

“And you will take Lily back?” Michael asked.

“Yes, yes, of course I will. But not because you ask me, mind. Don’t for heaven’s sake, puff yourself up with the idea that I’m doing anything except gratify myself in this matter.”

“I don’t want you to do it for any other reason,” he said. “I shall feel more secure with that pledge than with any you could think of. By the way, tell me about a man called Walker. Ronald Walker—a painter. He had an affair with Lily, didn’t he?”

“Ronnie Walker? He painted her; that was all. There was never anything more.”

“And Lonsdale? Arthur Lonsdale?”

“Who? The Honorable Arthur?”

Michael nodded.

“Yes, we met him first at Covent Garden, and went to Brighton with him and another boy—Clarehaven—Lord Clarehaven.”

“Oh, I remember him at the House,” said Michael.

“Money is necessary sometimes, you know,” Sylvia laughed.

“Of course it is. Look here. Will you in future, whenever you feel you’re in a nightmare—will you write to me and let me send money?” he asked. “I know you despise me and of course ... I understand; but I can’t bear to think of anyone being haunted as you must be haunted sometimes. Don’t be proud about this, because _I’ve_ got no pride left. I’m only terribly anxious to be of service to somebody. There’s really no reason for you to be proud. You see, I should always be so very much more anxious to help than you would to be helped. And it really isn’t only because of Lily that I say this. I’ve got a good many books you’d enjoy, and I think I’ll send them to you. Good-bye.”

“Good-bye,” she said, looking at him curiously.

Michael turned away from her down the gravel-path, and a moment later slammed the door. He had only gone a few steps away, when he heard Sylvia calling after him.

“You stupid!” she said. “You never told me Lily’s address.”

“I’ll give you a card.”

“Mr. Michael Fane,” she read, “1 Ararat House, Island Road.” She looked at him and raised her eyebrows.

“You see, I expected to live there myself,” Michael explained. “I told a friend of mine, Maurice Avery, to clear up everything. The furniture can all be sold. If you want anything for here, take it of course; but I think most of the things will be too large for Mulberry Cottage.”

“And what shall I say to Lily?” she asked.

“Oh, I don’t think I should say anything about me.”

“Who was the man?”

“I never saw him,” said Michael. “I only saw his hat.”

She pulled him to her and kissed him.

“How many women have done that suddenly like that?” she demanded.

“One—well, perhaps two.” He was wondering if Mrs. Smith’s kiss ought to count in the comparison.

“I never have to any man,” she said, and vanished through the door in the wall.

Michael hoped that Sylvia intended to imply by that kiss that his offer of help was accepted. Fancy her having read Petronius! He could send her his Adlington’s Apuleius. She would enjoy reading that, and he would write in it: _I’ve eaten rose-leaves and I am no longer a golden ass._ Perhaps he would also send her his Shelton’s Don Quixote.

When Michael turned out of Tinderbox Lane into the Fulham Road, each person of humanity he passed upon the pavement seemed to him strange with unrevealed secrets. The people of London were somehow transfigured, and he longed to see their souls, if it were only in the lucid flashes of a nightmare. Yet for nearly a year he had been peering into the souls of people. Had he, indeed. Had he not rather been peering to see in their souls the reflection of his own? He was moved by the thought of Sylvia in London, and suddenly he was swept from his feet by the surging against him of the thoughts of all the passers-by and, struggling in the trough of these thoughts, he was more and more conscious that unless he fought for himself he would be lost. The illusion fled on the instant of its creation; and the people were themselves again—dull, quick, slow, ordinary, depressed, gay; political busy-bodies, political fools, political slaves, political animals. How they huddled together, each one of them afraid to stand for himself. It was political passion that made them animals, each dependent in turn on the mimicry of his neighbor. Each was solicitous or jealous or fond or envious of his neighbor’s opinion. God was meaningless to the political state: this herd cared only for idols. Michael began to make a catalogue of the Golden Calves that the Golden Asses of green England worshiped. They were bowing down and braying to their Golden Calves, these Golden Asses, and they could not see that there were rose-trees growing everywhere, most prodigally of all in the gutter, any one petal of which (what did the thorns matter?) would have given back to them their humanity. Yet even then, Michael dismally concluded, they would continue to bow down to the Golden Calves, because they would fancy that it was the Calves who had planted and cultivated the rose-trees. Then out of all the thronging thoughts made visible he began to pursue the fancy of Sylvia in London, and, as he did so, she faded farther and farther from his vision like a butterfly seen from a train, that keeps pace, it seems for a moment, and is lost upon the flowery embankment behind.

Meanwhile, Michael was feeling sharpened for conflict by that talk under the mulberry tree: he realized what an amount of determination he had stored up for the persuasion of Sylvia. Now there only remained Leppard Street, and then he would go away from London. He walked on through the Chelsea slums.

Leppard Street was more melancholy in the sunshine than it had ever seemed in Winter, not so much because the sun made more evident the corrosion and the foulness as because of the stillness it shed. Not a breath of air twitched the torn paper-bag on the doorstep of Number One; and the five tall houses with their fifty windows stared at the blank wall opposite.

Michael wondered if Barnes would be out of bed: it was not yet one o’clock. He rang the front-door bell, or rather he hoped that the creaking of the broken wire along the basement passage would attract Mrs. Cleghorne’s attention. When he had tugged many times, she came out into the area, and peered up to see who it was. The sudden sunlight must have dazzled her eyes, for she was shading them with her hand. With her fibrous neck working and with an old cap of her husband’s pinned on a skimpy bun at the back of her head, she was horrible after Mrs. Gainsborough in the black and green gingham. Michael looked down at her over the railings; and she, recognizing him at last, pounced back to come up and open the door.

“I couldn’t think who it was. We had a man round selling pots of musk this morning, and I didn’t want to come trapesing upstairs for nothing.”

Mrs. Cleghorne was receiving him so pleasantly that Michael scarcely knew what to say. No doubt his regular payment of rent had a good deal to do with it.

“Is Mr. Barnes up?” he asked.

“I don’t know, I’m sure. I never go inside his door now. No.”

“Oh, really? Why not?”

“I’m the last person to make mischief, Mr. Fane, but I don’t consider he has treated us fair.”

“Oh, really?”

“He’s got a woman here living with him. Now of course that’s a thing I should never allow, but seeing as you weren’t here and was paying the rent regular I thought to myself that I’ll just shut my eyes until you came back. It’s really disgusting, and we has to be so particular with the other lodgers. It’s quite upset me, it has; and _Mis_-ter Cleghorne has been intending to speak to him about it. Only his asthma’s been so bad lately—it really seems to have knocked all the heart out of him.”

This pity for her husband was very ominous, Michael thought. Evidently the landlady was defending herself against an abrupt forfeiture of rent for the ground floor. Michael tapped at the door of his old room: it was locked.

“I’ll get on down again to my oven,” said Mrs. Cleghorne with a ratlike glance at the closed door. “I’m just cooking a bit of fish for my old man’s dinner.”

She fixed him with her eyes that were beady like the head of the hatpin in her cap, and sweeping her hand upward over her nose, she vanished.

Michael rapped again and, as there was no answer, he went along the passage and tried the bedroom door. Barnes’ voice called out to know who was there. Michael shouted his name, and heard Barnes whispering to somebody inside. Presently he opened the sitting-room door and invited Michael to come in.

It was extraordinary to see how with a few additions the character of the room had changed since Michael left it. The furniture was still there; but what had seemed ascetic was now mean. Spangled picture-postcards were standing along the mantelpiece. The autotypes of St. George and the Knight in Armor were both askew: the shelves had novelettes interspersed among the books; a soiled petticoat of yellow moirette lay over Michael’s narrow bed, which he was surprised to see in the sitting-room: a gas-stove had been fixed in the fireplace, and the old steel grate had been turned into a deposit for dirty plates and dishes: but what struck Michael most were the heavy curtains over the folding-doors between the two rooms. He looked at Barnes, waiting for him to explain the alterations.

“Looks a bit more homelike than it did, doesn’t it?” said Barnes, blinking round him.

A deterioration was visible even in Barnes himself. This was not merely the result of being without a collar or a shave, Michael decided: it was as hard to define as the evidence of death in a man’s eyes; but there clung to him an aura of corruption, and it seemed as if at a touch he would dissolve into a vile deliquescence.

“You look pretty pasty,” said Michael severely.

“Worry, old man, worry,” said Barnes. “Well, to put it straight, I fell in with a girl who was down on her luck, and I knew you’d be the very one to encourage a bit of charity. So I brought her here.”

“Why are you sleeping in this room?” Michael asked.

“You’re getting a Mr. Smart, aren’t you?” said Barnes. “Fancy you’re noticing that. Oh, well, I suppose you’ve come to ask for your rooms back?”

Michael with the consciousness of the woman behind those curtained doors knew that he could discuss nothing at present. He felt that all the time her ear was at the keyhole, and he went out suddenly, telling Barnes to meet him at the Orange that night.

Again the beerhall impressed him with its eternal sameness. It was as if a cinema film had broken when he last went out of the Café d’Orange, and had been set in action again at the moment of his return. He looked round to see if Daisy was there, and she was. Her hat which had formerly been black and trimmed with white daisies was now, to mark the season, white and trimmed with black daisies.

“Hulloa, little stranger!” she exclaimed. “Where have you been?”

So exactly the same was the Orange that Michael was almost surprised that she should have observed a passage of time.

“You never seem to come here now,” she said reproachfully. “Come on. Sit down. Don’t stand about like a man selling matches on the curb.”

“How’s Bert?” Michael asked.

“Who?”

“Bert Saunders. The man you were living with in Little Quondam Street.”

“Oh, him! Oh, I had to get rid of him double quick. What? Yes, when it came to asking me to go to Paris with a fighting fellow. Only fancy the cheek of it! It would help him, he said, with his business. Dirty Ecnop! I soon shoved him down the Apples-and-pears.”

“I haven’t understood a word of that last sentence,” said Michael.

“Don’t you know back-slang and rhyming-slang? Oh, it’s grand! Here, I forgot, there’s something I wanted to tell you. Do you remember you was in here with a fellow who you said his name was Burns?”

“Barnes, you mean, I expect. Yes, he’s supposed to be meeting me here to-night, as a matter of fact.”

“Well, you be careful of him. He’ll get you into trouble.”

Michael looked incredulous.

“It’s true as I sit here,” said Daisy earnestly. “Come over in the corner and let’s have our drink there. I can’t talk here with that blue-nosed —— behind me, squinting at us across his lager.” She looked round indignantly at the man in question.

They moved across to one of the alcoves, and Daisy leaned over and spoke quietly and rather tensely, so differently from the usual rollick of her voice that Michael began to feel a presentiment of dread.

“I was out on the Dilly one night soon after you’d been round to my place, and I was with a girl called Janie Filson. ‘Oo-er,’ she said to me. ‘Did you see who that was passed?’ I looked round and saw this fellow Burns.”

“Barnes,” Michael corrected.

“Oh, well, Barnes. His name doesn’t matter, because it isn’t his own, anyway. ‘That’s Harry Meats,’ she said. And she called out after him. ‘Hulloa, Harry, where’s Cissie?’ He went as white as ... oh, he did go shocking white. He just turned to see who it was had called out after him, and then he slid up Swallow Street like a bit of paper. ‘Who’s Cissie?’ I said. ‘Don’t you remember Cissie Cummings?’ she said. ‘That fair girl who always wore a big purple hat and used to be in the Leicester Lounge and always carried a box of chocolates for swank?’ I did remember the girl when Janie spoke about her. Only I never knew her, see? ‘He wasn’t very pleased when you mentioned her,’ I said. ‘Didn’t he look awful?’ said Janie, and just then she got off with a fellow and I couldn’t ask her any more.”

“I don’t think that’s enough to make me very much afraid of Barnes,” Michael commented.

“Wait a minute, I haven’t finished yet. Don’t be in such a hurry. The other day I saw Janie Filson again. She’s been away to Italy—is there a place called Italy? Of course there is. Well, as I was saying, she’d been to Italy with her fellow who’s a commercial traveler and that’s why I hadn’t seen her. And Janie said to me, ‘Do you know what they’re saying?’ I said, ‘No, what?’ And she said, ‘Did you read nearly a year ago about a woman who was found murdered in the Euston Road? A gay woman it was,’ she said. So I said, ‘Lots of women is found murdered, my dear. I can’t remember every one I see the picture of.’ Well, anyone can’t, can they?” Daisy broke off to ask Michael in an injured voice. Then she resumed her tale. “When I was with that fellow Bert I used to read nothing else but murders all the time. Give anyone the rats, it would. ‘Lots of women, my dear,’ I said. And she said, ‘Well, there was one in particular who the police never found out the name of, because there wasn’t any clothing or nothing found.’ So I did remember about it, and she said, ‘Well, they’re saying now it was Cissie Cummings.’ And I said, ‘Well, what of it, if it was?’ And she said, ‘What of it?’ she said. ‘Well, if it was her,’ she said, ‘I know who done it.’ ‘Who done it?’ I asked—because, you see, I’d forgotten about this fellow Burns. ‘Why, Harry Meats,’ she said. ‘That fellow I saw on the Dilly the night when I was along with you.’”

“I don’t think you have enough evidence for the police,” Michael decided, with half a smile. Yet nevertheless a malaise chilled him, and he looked over his shoulder at the mob in the beer hall.

“—— the police!” Daisy exclaimed. “I don’t care about them when I’m positive certain of something. I tell you, I know that fellow Burns, or Meats, or whatever his name is, done it.”

“But what am I to do about it?” Michael asked.

“Well, you’ll get into trouble, that’s all,” Daisy prophesied. “You’d look very funny if he was pinched for murder while you was out walking with him. Ugh! It gives me the creeps. Order me a gin, there’s a good boy.”

Michael obtained for Daisy her drink, and sat waiting for Barnes to appear.

“He won’t come,” Daisy scoffed. “If he’s feeling funny about the neck, he won’t come down here. He’s never been down since that night he came down with you. Fancy, to go and do a poor girl in like that! I’d spit in his face, if I saw him.”

“Daisy, you really mustn’t assume such horrible things about a man. He’s as innocent as you or me.”

“Is he?” Daisy retorted. “I don’t think so then. You never saw how shocking white his face went when Janie asked him about Cissie.”

“But if there were any suspicion of him,” Michael pointed out, “the police would have tackled him long ago.”

“Oh, they aren’t half artful, the police aren’t,” said Daisy. “Nothing they’d like better than get waiting about and seeing if he didn’t go and murder another poor girl, so as they could have him for the two, and be all the more pleased about it.”

“That’s talking nonsense,” Michael protested. “The police don’t do that sort of thing.”

“I don’t know,” Daisy argued. “One or two poor girls more or less wouldn’t worry them. After all, that’s what we’re for—to get pinched when they’ve got nothing better to do. Of course, I know it’s part of the game, but there it is. If you steal my purse and I follow you round and tell a copper, what would he do? Why, pinch me for soliciting. No, my motto is, ‘Keep out of the way of the police.’ And if you take my advice, you’ll do the same. If this fellow didn’t do the girl in,” Daisy asked earnestly, leaning forward over the table, “why doesn’t he come down here and keep his appointment with you to-night? Don’t you worry. He knows the word has gone round, and he’s going to lie very low for a bit. I wouldn’t say the tecs aren’t watching out for him even now.”

“My dear Daisy, you’re getting absolutely fanciful,” Michael declared.

“Oh, well, good luck to fanciful,” said Daisy, draining her glass. “Here, why don’t you come home with me to-night?”

“What, and spend another three hours hiding in a cupboard?”

“No, properly, I mean, this time. Only we should have to go to a hotel, because the woman I’m living with’s got her son come home from being a soldier and she wouldn’t like for him to know anything. Well, it’s better not. You’re much more comfortable when you aren’t in gay rooms, because they haven’t got a hold over you. Are you coming?”

For a moment Michael was inclined to invite Daisy to go away with him. For a moment it seemed desirable to bury himself in a corner of the underworld: to pass his life there for as long as he could stand it. He could easily make this girl fond of him, and he might be happy with her. No doubt, it would be ultimately a degrading happiness, but yet not much more degrading than the prosperity of many of his friends. He had always escaped so far and hidden himself successfully. Why not again more completely? What, after all, did he know of this underworld without having lived of it as well as in it? Hitherto he had been a spectator, intervening sometimes in the sudden tragedies and comedies, but never intervening except as very essentially a spectator. He thought, as he sat opposite to Daisy with her white dress and candid roguery, that it would be amusing to become a rogue himself. There would be no strain in living with Daisy. Love in the way that he had loved Lily would be a joke to her. Why should not he take her for what she was—shrewd, mirthful, kind, honest, the natural light of love? He would do her no wrong by accepting her as such. She was immemorial in the scheme of the universe.

Michael was on the point of offering to Daisy his alliance, when he remembered what Sylvia had said about men and, though he knew that Daisy could not possibly think in that way about men, he had no courage to plunge with her into deeper labyrinths not yet explored. He thought of the contempt with which Sylvia would hail him, were they in this nightmare of London to meet in such circumstances. A few weeks ago—yesterday, indeed—he might have joined himself to Daisy under the pretext of helping her and improving her. Now he must help himself: he must aim at perfecting himself. Experiments, when at any moment passion might enter, were too dangerous.

“No, I won’t come home with you, dear Daisy,” he said, taking her hand over the puddly table. “You know, you didn’t kiss me that night in Quondam Street because you thought I might one day come home with you, did you?”

She shrugged her shoulders.

“What’s the good of asking me why I kissed you?” she said, embarrassed and almost made angry by his reminder. “Perhaps I was twopence on the can. I can get very loving on a quartern of gin, I can. Oh, well, if you aren’t coming home, you aren’t, and I must get along. Sitting talking to you isn’t paying my rent, is it?”

He longed to offer her money, but he could not, because it was seeming to him now indissolubly linked with hiring. However genuinely it was a token of exchange, money was eluding his capacity for idealization, and he was at a loss to find a symbol service.

“Is there nothing I can do for you?”

“Yes, you can give me two quid in case I don’t get off to-night.”

He offered them to her eagerly.

“Go on, you silly thing,” she said, pushing the money away. “As if I meant it.”

“If you didn’t, I did,” said Michael.

“Oh, all right,” she replied, with a wink, putting the money in her purse. “Well, chin-chin, Clive, don’t be so long coming down here next time.”

“Michael is my name,” he said, for he was rather distressed to think that she would pass forever from his life supposing him to be called Clive.

“As if I didn’t know that,” she said. “I remember, because it’s a Jew name.”

“But it isn’t,” Michael contradicted.

“Jews are called that.”

“Very likely,” he admitted.

“Oh, well, it’ll be all the same in a hundred years.”

She picked up her white gloves, and swaggered across the crowded beerhall. At the foot of the stairs she turned and waved them to him. Then she disappeared.

Michael sat on in the Café d’Orange, waiting for Barnes, but he did not arrive before closing-time; and when Michael was walking home, the tale of Daisy gathered import, and he had a dreary feeling that her suspicions were true. He did not feel depressed so much because he was shocked by the notion of Barnes as a murderer (he thought that probably murder was by no means the greatest evil he had done), as because he feared the fancy of him in the hands of the police. It appalled him to imagine that material hell of the trial. The bandage dropped from the eyes of justice, and he saw her pig’s-eyes mean, cowardly, revengeful; and her scales were like a grocer’s. He pitied Barnes in the clutches of anthropocracy. What a ridiculous word: it probably did not exist. After all, Daisy’s story was ridiculous, too. Barnes had objected to himself’s hailing him as Meats: and there were plenty of reasons to account for his dislike of Janie Filson’s salute without supposing murder. Nevertheless, back again, as softly and coaxingly as the thought used to come to Michael when he was a small boy lying in bed, the thought of murder maintained an innuendo of probability. Yet it was absurd to think of murder on this summer night, with all these jingling hansoms and all that fountainous sky of stars. Why, then, had Barnes not met him at the Orange to-night? It was not like him to break an appointment when his pocket might be hurt. What rumor of Cissie Cummings had traveled even to Leppard Street?

Michael had reached Buckingham Palace Road, and he took the direction for Pimlico; it was not too late to get into the house. He changed his mind again and drove back to Cheyne Walk. Up in his bedroom, the curiosity to know why Barnes had not kept the appointment recurred with double force, and Michael after a search found the key of the house in Leppard Street and went out again. It was getting on for two o’clock, and without the lights of vehicles the night was more than ever brilliant. Under the plane-trees Michael was stabbed with one pang for Lily, and he repined at the waste of this warm June.

The clocks had struck two when he reached Leppard Street, and the houses confronted him, their roofs and chimneys prinked with stars. Several windows glimmered with a turbid orange light; but these signals of habitation only emphasized the unconsciousness of the sleepers behind, and made the desolation of the rest more positive. The windows of his old rooms were black, and Michael unlocked the front door quietly and stood listening for a moment in the passage. He could hear a low snarling in the bedroom, but from where he was standing not a word was distinct, and he could not bring himself to point of listening close to the keyhole. He shut the front door and waited in the blackness, fascinated by the rise and fall of the low snarl that was seeming so sinister in this house. It was incredible that a brief movement would open the front door again and let in the starlight; for, as he stood here, Leppard Street was under the earth deep down. He moved a little farther into the hall, and, putting out his hand to feel for the balusters, drew back with a start, for he might have clapped it down upon a cold bald head, so much like that was the newel’s wooden knob. Still the snarling rose and fell: the darkness grew thicker and every instant more atramental, beating upon him from the steeps of the house like the filthy wings of a great bat: and still the snarling rose and fell. It rose and fell like the bubbling of a kettle, and then without warning the kettle overflowed with spit and hiss and commotion. Every word spoken by Barnes and the woman was now audible.

“I say he gave you thirty shillings. Now then!” Barnes yapped.

“And I tell you he only gave me a sovereign, which you’ve had.”

“Don’t I hear through the door what you get?”

Michael knew why Barnes had not been able to keep his appointment to-night, and though he was outraged at the use to which his rooms had been put, he was glad to be relieved of the fear that this snarling was the prelude to the revelation of Barnes as a murderer. The recriminations with their details of vileness were not worth hearing longer, and Michael went quickly and quietly out into the Summer night, which smelled so sweet after that passage.

He turned round by the lamp-post at the corner and looked back at the five stark houses; he could not abandon their contemplation; and he pored upon them as intensely as he might have pored upon a tomb of black basalt rising out of desert sand. He was immured in the speculation of their blackness: he pondered hopelessly their meaning and brooded upon the builders that built them and the sphinx that commanded them to be built.

In his present mood Michael would have thought Stonehenge rather prosaic; and he leaned against the wall in the silence, thinking of brick upon brick, or brick upon brick slabbed with mortar and chipped and tapped in the past, of brick upon brick as the houses grew higher and higher ... a railway engine shrieked suddenly: the door of Number One slammed: and a woman came hurrying down the steps. She looked for a moment to right and left of her, and then she moved swiftly with a wild, irregular walk in Michael’s direction. He had a sensation that she had known he was standing here against this wall, that she had watched him all the while and was hurrying now to ask why he had been standing here against this wall. He could not turn and walk away: he could not advance to meet her: so he stood still leaning against the wall. Michael saw her very plainly as she passed him in the lamplight. Her hat was askew, and a black ostrich plume hung down over her big chalky face: her lips were glistening as if they had been smeared with jam. She was wearing a black satin cloak, and she seemed, as her skirts swept past him, like an overblown grotesque of tragedy being dragged by a wire from the scene.

Michael shuddered at the monstrousness of her femininity; he seemed to have been given a glimpse of a mere mass of woman, a soft obscene primeval thing that demanded blows from a club, nothing else. He realized how in a moment men could become haters of femininity, could hate its animalism and wish to stamp upon it. The physical repulsion he had felt vanished when the sound of her footsteps had died away. In the reaction Michael pitied her, and he went back quietly to Number One with the intention of turning Barnes into the street. He was rather startled as he walked up the steps to see Barnes’ face pressed against the window-pane, for it seemed to him ludicrous that he should wave reassuringly to a mask like that.

Barnes hurried to open the front door before Michael had taken the key from his pocket, and was not at all surprised to see him.

“Here, I couldn’t get down to the Orange to-night. I’ve had a bit of trouble with this girl.”